The Register

No, really, those are the magic words A clever AI bug hunter found a way to trick ChatGPT into disclosing Windows product keys, including at least one owned by Wells Fargo bank, by inviting the AI model to play a guessing game....

Built on Chromium, ironically Perplexity has released its own web browser called Comet, and it's clearly aimed at Google....

Hey, teacher, leave those kids to AI After committing more than $13 billion in strategic investments to OpenAI, Microsoft is splashing out billions more to get people using the technology....

Welcome back to the age of dark patterns The US was supposed to celebrate the enforcement date for an FTC rule requiring companies to offer simple, clear, one-click subscription cancellations next Monday, but a panel of appeals court judges has decided otherwise....

Turns out outsourcing coders to bankroll Kim's nukes doesn't jibe with Uncle Sam The US Treasury has imposed sanctions on 38-year-old Song Kum Hyok, a North Korean accused of attempting to hack the Treasury Department and posing as an IT worker to collect revenue and secret data for Pyongyang....

Low-severity bugs but infosec pros claim they are a 'critical' overall threat - patch accordingly AMD is warning users of a newly discovered form of side-channel attack affecting a broad range of its chips that could lead to information disclosure....

Chasing the hype without a clear use case? You may crash and burn US Environmental Protection Agency CIO Carter Farmer has a blunt message for AI hype-chasers: Shiny-object syndrome too often drives teams to leap into AI without defining a clear use case or vetting their data, leaving them to wonder why it doesn't work....

Using proof of work to block the web-crawlers of 'AI' companies Anubis is a sort of CAPTCHA test, but flipped: instead of checking visitors are human, it aims to make web crawling prohibitively expensive for companies trying to feed their hungry LLM bots....

Design sent to TSMC as startup wraps 130M funding round and targets 2026 silicon Euro chip designer SiPearl has finally taped out its Rhea1 processor destined for Jupiter, the first European exascale supercomputer, just as its Series A financing round ends with an injection of cash from a new investor....

But Chocolate Factory love-in sorely lacks detail The UK government has signed a pact with Google Cloud to "upskill" as many as 100,000 civil servants in the latest tech by 2030....

No word on who pressed the 'MechaHitler' button xAI is scrambling to contain the fallout after its Grok chatbot went - and there is no other way of putting this - full Nazi in its X (formerly Twitter) posts....

Version 140 has built-in MS Exchange support - and a year's updates ahead The latest version of the messaging client from Mozilla subsidiary MZLA has a bunchof useful new features, and will get updated until mid 2026....

Plus: Confirms less serious data points like meal preferences also leaked Qantas says that when cybercrooks attacked a "third party platform" used by the airline's contact center systems, they accessed the personal information and frequent flyer numbers of the "majority" of the circa 5.7 million people affected....

Oodles of euros on offer for not accidentally blowing up stuff Comment The European Space Agency (ESA) is pressing ahead with its European Launcher Challenge (ELC), and the good news is that three of the five pre-selected candidates have yet to explode anything in public....

Customers say things are still far from perfect as lengthy support queues hamper business dealings Ingram Micro says it is gradually reactivating customer's ordering capabilities across the world, region by region, now its ransomware attack is thought to be "contained"....

Activists argue the resources spent on tech aren't leading to worthwhile numbers Privacy activists are unimpressed with London's Metropolitan Police and its use of live facial recognition (LFR) to catch criminals, saying it is not effective use of taxpayer money and an overreach by government....

Akkodis report suggests people skills may be helpful to bring out the best in AI Executives are losing faith in AI initiatives despite rising investment, according to a study conducted by consultancy Akkodis....

Tells would-be affiliates they don't need to worry because cyberattacks don't violate a cease fire An Iranian ransomware-as-a-service operation with ties to a government-backed cyber crew has reemerged after a nearly five-year hiatus, and is offering would-be cybercriminals cash to infect organizations in the US and Israel....

A big bet that RISC-V can make a dent in the AI market GlobalFoundries has acquired chip design firm MIPS, creating a company that both designs and creates semiconductors....

Envisions info from your watch informing treatment. What could possibly go wrong? Samsung has acquired US company Xealth to combine data drawn from its wearable devices and hospital records....

Operations king Jeff Williams abdicates - just don't give him a watch Apple Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams is stepping down from his role next month and leaving the company later this year to spend more time with friends and family....

Sure, 130 fixes were sent out, but bask in the security goodness For the first time this year, Microsoft has released a Patch Tuesday bundle with no exploited security problems, although one has been made public already, and there are ten critical flaws to fix....

More efficient cores plus an optional energy saver mode in Big Blue's latest CPUs In case you'd forgotten, IBM is still blazing its own trail with regard to silicon. And in terms of speeds and feeds, Big Blue's latest crop of Power chips boasts up to 55 percent faster cores than its Power9 chips....

It connects using peer-to-peer networking instead of the internet Serial entrepreneur Jack Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter and currently acts as CEO of payments company Block, has released the source code for a peer-to-peer messaging app called bitchat that relies on Bluetooth for network connectivity....

You want that military contract? Then no more proprietary repairability clauses! A bipartisan pair of Senators is so happy with the US Army's right to repair policy that they want to enshrine it in federal law as the standard across military branches....

These extensions weren't malware-laced from the start, researcher says A Chrome and Edge extension with more than 100,000 downloads that displays Google's verified badge does what it purports to do: It delivers a color picker to users. Unfortunately, it also hijacks every browser session, tracks activities across websites, and backdoors victims' web browsers, according to Koi Security researchers....

Including frequencies that overlap with Wi-Fi 6E and private mobile networking updated A provision in the new US budget bill opens a wide swath of spectrum for sale, including some that overlaps with frequencies currently allotted for private mobile networks and Wi-Fi 6E....

Climate risks threaten to fry the supply chain for essential chipmaking metal Climate change could pose a threat to the technology industry as copper production is vulnerable to drought, while demand may grow to outstrip supply anyway....

'If this is the priority for our tax dollars, we are doomed' The US Congress has passed President Donald Trump's budget bill. In addition to the possibility of a Space Shuttle move, significant changes are on the way for NASA....

First volume of inquiry report focuses on the scandal's human impact Senior Post Office staff - and those working for suppliers Fujitsu and ICL - knew or should have known about the defects causing errors in the Horizon system that contributed to the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of branch workers, 13 of whom committed suicide, most probably as a result, according to the first volume of a government report into the computer scandal....

Modern threats demand modern defenses. Cloud-native is the new baseline Partner content Every organization is investing in cyberresilience tools, training, and processes. Unfortunately, only some of them will be able to successfully respond and recover from an attack. Regardless of how hard they work, many IT and security teams are constrained by legacy technology architectures that were built for the challenges of 2015, not 2025....

'We are troubled by the citation of bogus cases in the trial court's order' The Georgia Court of Appeals has tossed a state trial court's order because it relied on court cases that do not exist, presumably generated by an AI model....

Move targets European orgs wary of cross-border data exposure Linux veteran SUSE has unveiled a new support package aimed at customers concerned about data sovereignty....

If a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is The US General Services Administration (GSA) has announced an agreement with Oracle it claims offers a 75 percent discount on the vendor's license-based technology....

Zewei Xu's family reportedly bemused at arrest as extradition tabled A man who US authorities allege is a member of Chinese state-sponsored cyberespionage outfit Silk Typhoon was arrested in Milan last week following a tipoff from the US embassy....

Official figures for network performance don't play out in user's reality, says monitoring biz The UK's 5G networks are among the worst in Europe when it comes to measurements such as download speed, upload speed, latency, and packet loss, according to a report published today....

Mozilla's management is a bug, not a feature Opinion Dominance does not equal importance, nor is dominance the same as relevance. The snag at Mozilla is a management layer that doesn't appear to understand what works for its product nor which parts of it matter most to users....

Those pirated video nasties won't last forever The UK police service is planning to launch a procurement to purchase tech and services worth up to 75 million ($102 million) in order to digitize its VHS archive....

The mighty Z80 processor ran the code at astounding speed, proving retro-tech got a lot of things right A Microsoft senior software engineer named Alice Vinogradova has ported a database she wrote in SAP's ABAP language to the venerable Z80 processor that powered the Sinclair ZX Spectrum - and marveled at the results....

Plus: Qantas makes contact with 'potential cyber criminal' While the aviation industry has borne the brunt of Scattered Spider's latest round of social engineering attacks, the criminals aim to catch manufacturing and medical tech companies - and even Chipotle Mexican Grill -in tjeor web, as evidenced by hundreds of domains that security researchers say look a lot like phishing websites used by the criminal crews....

They're both silent on what, if anything, has changed Epic Games has settled the case it brought against Samsung over the Korean giant's treatment of third-party app stores on its Galaxy handsets....

Memory from Korea, hard disks from Thailand, plenty of stuff from Japan World War Fee The Trump administration on Monday announced the tariff rates it will impose on fourteen nations starting on August 1st, and several big technology-producing nations made the list....

Investors advised to brace for massive fall from Q1 to Q2 Analysis During the AI gold rush, the next best thing to selling the shovels - that is, the GPUs -is manufacturing the silicon that makes them possible. But while TSMC and SK-Hynix continue to cash in on Nvidia's successes, Samsung hasn't been nearly so fortunate....

Using prompt injections to play a Jedi mind trick on LLMs A handful of international computer science researchers appear to be trying to influence AI reviews with a new class of prompt injection attack....

Forget small modular reactors. Microreactors are the new hotness The new nuclear age of small modular reactors may not have materialized yet, but that's not stopping the US Department of Energy from getting to work on even smaller, more modular reactors with a couple of new commercial partners....

NetScaler vendor issued a patch but otherwise, stony silence Multiple exploits are circulating for CVE-2025-5777, a critical bug in Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway dubbed CitrixBleed 2, and security analysts are warning a "significant portion" of users still haven't patched....

All the GPUs in the world aren't worth much if you don't have a place to put them CoreWeave just added 1.3 gigawatts of datacenter capacity to its rent-a-GPU scheme with the $9 billion acquisition of crypto-mining outfit Core Scientific, the companies announced Monday....

The iMaker's fight with European regulators continues Apple is on the hook for a 500 million (US $587 million) anti-steering fine in the EU, so it's reportedly doing what any profit-driven enterprise in such a position would do: Appealing....

Lucy in the sky with calcium Astroboffins have found the first evidence of a double-detonated Type Ia supernova, which could explain why we have enough bright points of reference in the skies to plot our place in the universe....

As power concerns beset builds, this floating datacenter can plug into powership next door Japanese shipping biz Mitsui OSK Lines (MOL) is planning to fit out a ship as a floating datacenter that can draw energy from the shore or from an accompanying powership....